


Motel at the End of the World

by Cadhla



Series: From Buttonwillow to Here [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Everyone Needs A Hug, Everyone Needs A Nap, F/F, F/M, Faith Lehane is Done With Your Shit, POV: Faith Lehane, Post-Chosen, Roof Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 23:55:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5560831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cadhla/pseuds/Cadhla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After everything falls down, where can you go?  Immediately post-Chosen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Motel at the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> This is primarily a Faith piece, and she can be a little abrasive, as per the canon. More graphic sex than I usually go in for; lots of self-loathing. Faith is fun! So fun...

Xander screamed when they yanked him out of the collapsing school, fighting against hands that were stronger than they had any right to be, shouting her name over and over again, like the sheer force of his need would be enough to right whatever wrongs had been committed. Faith watched as they pulled him onto the bus, her own attention mostly taken up with Principle Wood--yet another father figure, now spank me daddy, I’ve been a naughty little girl--who seemed intent on pushing himself even further than the Slayers. If the bus got them out, any of them, it wouldn’t matter who they left behind. Not Anya, not Amanda or Elizabeth or Christine, not any of them.

Not even Buffy.

 _Finally got your wish, B,_ Faith thought, with her eyes half on the road and half on the man bleeding on the steering wheel. _Ain’t no way they’re dragging you back from this one._

The bus rattled over the disintegrating road connecting Sunnydale to the outside world, shocks protesting every bump and pothole, while the walking wounded inside did their best to hold back their own complaints. So damn many deaths. So damn many little girls. And now they’d blown their whole wad at once, like a high school boy with his first real fuck, sending off armies of sperm to die for the cause of penetrating just one egg. For a moment, Faith pictured the First Evil gravid with the sons and daughters of the sacrificial Slayers that they’d left behind--all those girls whose families would never know just where they went, or how they died, or why. At least Buffy didn’t have a family left to fail to notify. Only Dawn, the sister-who-wasn’t, sobbing in the back of the bus with all the others.

Something hit the top of the bus with a thump, almost lost in the rattling of the shocks and the moans of the wounded, and Faith shook her head, eyes still on the road. “Never did know when to stay dead,” she muttered.

“What?” asked Wood.

“Nothing,” Faith replied, and the road unspooled in front of them and the city died behind them, and that was that, and the war was over.

*

Buttonwillow, California. Land of cotton, dirt clods, and a single Dairy Queen that was currently doing the sort of business its owners had previously only dreamed of. They were, in the words of Giles, "Just far enough outside Los Angeles to be safe for a little while, and just close enough to get to the airport with a minimum of fuss."

What the fuck ever.

But Slayers or no, the former Potentials--she’d heard them called "Maids in Waiting" once, and she liked the term a hell of a lot better than "Potentials"; it made them sound more like what they were, sacrifices-to-be, lambs for someone else’s altar, not pretty little girls with the potential to be anything they wanted--were still just a flock of teenagers who wanted the things that every teenager wants. Including ice cream when they were feeling lousy, or broken, or mourning for the ones they left behind. It was sort of impressive, the number of banana splits Rona and Dawn could put away between them. Like watching a trash compactor swallowing a goat.

 _There’s an image for the ages,_ she thought, with a certain grim amusement, and resumed pacing the motel walkway, boot heels ringing crisp and sharp across the broken tiles of the courtyard.

As motels went, it wasn’t the most impressive one she’d ever seen. Built of cheap stucco and plastic meant to look like adobe, it was a wide C-shape around a shattered courtyard with "decorative" tiles that sliced your feet if you were stupid enough to go walking barefoot across them. The empty bowl of the long-drained swimming pool reminded her uncomfortably of the pit they’d left behind them in their flight from Sunnydale, and so she tried not to look at it, focusing instead on the echoing clip-clip-clip of her footsteps, and the sound of distant laughter that carried on the thin air from the Dairy Queen across the parking lot. She was on patrol, even though there was nothing she could fight against.

She was on patrol, because someone had to be. That was what Slayers did. They went on patrol, they walked the walk and they talked the talk, and they died the good deaths, forever and ever, amen. She'd learned that from her first Watcher, the one who died while she watched, all red blood and white bone and the thousand other colors that hide inside a body (gray and green and white and yellow and oh, the red went on forever), the one who'd told her she was special. Before Gwen Post and Wesley and Giles and all the rest. The one whose name Buffy had never even bothered to ask. Didn’t happen to a Summers girl; didn’t really matter.

Slayers patrolled because that was what they needed to do. She knew that, and Buffy knew that, and now Giles was the last Watcher of them all--although the council would rise again, she knew that, you can’t kill an infection just by chopping off a leg--and he was teaching all the other girls, in between their spates of crying and laughing and Dairy Queen. Teaching them that they weren’t Potential anymore; all their potential had been used up by one little red-haired witch, and an axe, and a spell, and the golden girl of the Slayer line, who gave them a choice that wasn’t a choice.

 _No one’s gonna refuse when their lives are on the line,_ Faith thought, and her heels went clip-clip-clip, and her thighs rustled together with the shushing sound of worn denim rubbing against itself, and she tried to make believe she was at peace. _We needed to win. We didn’t have a choice either._

Not once Buffy’d had the big idea. Call them all--all of them at once, everywhere in the world, and damn the consequences. Even after everything, after Angel and the Mayor and Faith herself, Buffy wanted to believe that good would win, in the end. That nothing was so flawed it couldn’t be re-forged and made perfect, if the fire was hot enough. Burn the impurities right the fuck out of that metal.

And they’d asked the girls, "Do you want to live as Slayers or die as Maids in Waiting?". And of course the girls chose life, because that’s what you did when you were a teenage girl facing your own extinction, when you were looking up and seeing the stars winking out one by one as you buried your friends and kissed your future goodbye. It seemed like a way to see tomorrow, so of course they all said yes.

But they didn’t ask the world. They didn’t ask every Maid in Waiting in the whole damn world--the ones too old or too young for the current generation, the ones the First had never thought to target--whether or not they wanted Calling. And when the Call went out, all those girls got Called, just like Faith did, just like Buffy and Kendra and all those little girls before them. All those little girls who never had a choice.

“We did it, B,” she said aloud, and the taste of her voice was like blood and ashes in her mouth, like a wound that would never heal. “We did them worse than the Watchers did us.”

Because at least when they’d been Called, the Watchers were there, waiting, ready to take them up and teach them how to stay alive, to teach them how to handle their flaws. Faith knew about flaws. She knew about the feeling of being the victim, being the one they drove down into the dust with words and looks and shoves. Welfare girl, they called her, and little slut your mama was a slut you’ll be one too--words that echoed down the years until they went from taunt to prophecy, and her lipstick was fuck-me-red (just like mama’s) and her pants were painted on, and she was a slut just like mama, half because she wanted to be and half because of what they’d called her on the playground.

Some of those girls, the ones they’d Called and then abandoned with their new powers in an old world, some of those girls would be flawed, maybe worse than she was. They’d be older and more broken, or younger and more angry, and there were no Watchers there to pick them up and teach them what it was to be a Slayer. The Watchers were a muzzle on the Slayer line, and she knew that; they existed to limit the Slayers, to make them bow down and put them under control.

Faith had lost control. Only once, but once had been enough to leave a man dead and leave her world in tatters. She’d always been a "bad girl"--she’d never been an evil one. Fuck-me lipstick and leather pants didn’t mean she wanted to be evil. She just wanted to be herself. And then she lost control.

Slayers needed Watchers. Slayers needed Watchers, and Buffy had created a whole world full of Slayers who weren’t being watched.

Faith walked, and her heels went clip-clip-clip, and she tried not to think about tomorrow.

*

When the bus rolled into Buttonwillow, they’d stopped at the first motel they saw. It was the off-season, and the clerk on duty met their ragged, bloody band with the joy of an innkeeper seeing his bills suddenly go from red to black with the turn of just one friendly Visa card. More than one: Xander had Anya’s credit cards, and that girl had carried enough plastic to finance an army. The address the bills would go to didn’t exist anymore, but the motel had no way of knowing that. He just took the card and rang the rooms through, three girls to a room, Willow and Kennedy together, Buffy and Dawn together, Andrew and Robin and Xander and Giles and Faith all alone. Maybe that was truer than anyone intended it to be.

Faith didn’t know why Xander had Anya’s wallet in his pocket, and after a moment of consideration, she decided that she didn’t want to ask. Anya hadn’t been an issue when she was there before, not really; she was Xander’s first fuck, just her and him in that first flea-bitten motel, where the bedsprings creaked as she rode him and the floors shook with every step she took. She hadn’t loved him and he hadn’t loved her, but the boy had a thing for women who knew how to wrap their thighs around the world and squeeze it until it screamed. Anya must have been the same kind of girl.

That first night she slept alone in her boxy little room with its dingy little windows looking out on the empty pool. It stared back at her like a blind, accusing eye, and so she drew the curtains and lay there, dozing in a sticky haze of drying sweat and matted blood, listening to the distant whine of the air conditioner. The walls were thin, and Willow and Kennedy were in the next room over; they woke her at three in the morning with the sound of moaning, and so she shoved one hand into her panties and masturbated herself back to sleep, ending with a sharp and joyless climax just before the world blurred away and she was dreaming of the First Evil, with her pretty, pretty smile, just like Buffy’s, and her skin that you could never really touch.

Just like Buffy’s.

They started changing rooms around the next day. The Potentials--no, the Slayers, their own little, diminished army of Slayers--shifted who was sleeping with who, traded rooms according to some unspoken pattern that she was too old and too long a Slayer to be privy to. No one really commented when Dawn left Buffy’s room and went to bunk with Andrew, who stared dry-eyed into the empty pool and talked about Anya like she’d been there any day; like she hadn’t died, but just been delayed by some petty little detail she had to reconcile before she could arrive. Buffy didn’t protest the move. She just turned away and closed the door.

Robin had half-expected Faith to bunk with him, but when she didn’t, he didn’t complain; war zones and burial grounds are different things. She fucked him in one and she left him in the second, alone with his gut wound and his boxy little room just like hers, one floor below. She wondered if he heard her bedsprings creak at night and dreamed about her hands around his throat. She realized, with a certain sort of distance, that she really didn’t care.

On the second day, Giles and Xander went down to the town’s single seedy little bar and drank until they could barely walk. They hadn’t come home by last call, and so Faith had gone to Buffy, telling her, “Hey, B, the boys should be back by now.” But Buffy had just turned her face towards the wall, and so it was Faith who went and brought them home, holding Xander up when Giles was puking in the bushes, listening to Xander’s endless, blubbering litany of Anya’s virtues. She’d expected to be disgusted, or bored, but she wasn’t. The man was hurting. Both of them were, all of them were, and somehow she was the only one still standing on her own.

The third day passed almost peacefully, the group running up Anya’s credit card bills while the girls flocked around the Dairy Queen like gaily-colored birds and Buffy huddled in her room ignoring the world. Willow and Kennedy emerged long enough to accompany Wood on a supply run, returning with meat and beer and potato chips, and that night, they had a barbecue in the courtyard while Xander wore an apron that read "Kiss the Cook" and Giles rejoiced in the six bottles of Guinness that Wood had managed to coax from the local liquor store. Even Buffy emerged to eat a chicken breast and make pale, passionless jokes with the former Potentials, who treated her like she was some sort of goddess come down from on high to spill her pearls of wisdom on the ground.

 _Ain’t that always the way,_ thought Faith, and it was almost a kind thought, gentle and amused and not bitter in the slightest. _She comes down from her mountain and we treat her like a princess. Me, I was down here in the dirt the whole damn time._

By midnight the courtyard was empty save for Giles, sitting and nursing his last bottle of Guinness, watching as the coals in the barbecue glowed red and sullen, dying one by one. Faith walked over to him and sat, silencing the clip-clip-clip of her heels. For a while, that was all.

Giles spoke first--that was another thing she wouldn’t have expected, even here in this wasteland where everything went after it had changed too much to be real anymore--and said, “You don’t have to baby-sit me. I may be an old man, but I can handle a few pints without falling down.”

“Wasn’t babysitting,” Faith replied. “Just enjoying the night.”

“And my oh so scintillating company?”

“That, too,” she said, kicking back and stretching out long, denim-clad legs in front of her as she studied him. He’d aged so damn much since she came to Sunnydale that first time; he could probably pin a name on every gray hair on his head, every wrinkle on his face. She knew he’d never married, but to be a Watcher was to bury your children, whether you had them or not. That was just the nature of the game. “Got big plans for the night?”

“I was considering finishing this beer, then going to bed and sleeping the sleep of the just and the righteous. Assuming the air conditioner will stop its infernal whining long enough for me to fall asleep, that is.”

“Big assumption,” Faith agreed. “Got a better offer.”

“What’s that?” he asked, turning to look at her. Without his glasses, he looked more vulnerable; more worn down. They were a kind of armor for him, just like fuck-me-red lipstick had always been for her, and she respected that in him. Bad girls know their own, even a lifetime and a continent away.

“There’s a staircase up to the roof. We go up there, you and me, and I ride you hard, and we sleep the sleep of the wicked and the sticky. Air conditioner not an issue.”

Giles lowered his beer, slowly. “Faith...”

“Hear me out.” Faith raised a hand. “I ain’t looking for commitment, and I ain’t looking for a relationship. We both know what I want, and it’s not you. But I’m tired of sleeping alone and listening to the amazing wonder dykes banging through the wall, and if you need a lay as bad as I do, I’m amazed you haven’t picked me up yet.”

“One night.”

“One night, and you let me have a hit off that beer.” Faith nodded towards the bottle.

After a long pause, he lowered it, and offered it to her. She drained the remaining liquid in one convulsive gulp, then flung it aside, towards the lip of the pool’s empty eye, where it shattered into a thousand dark shards, one becoming many, never to be whole again. Some of those shards slipped over the edge, falling down the hole, and were gone.

Faith shuddered, taking Giles’ hand, and led him towards the stairs.

*

The first time Faith got laid, she was fifteen, and she didn’t quite get it. The opening steps were the same--a hand on the breast, an awkward kiss, a tongue rammed down the throat--but the closing act was new, and banal, and messy. One little spread of the thighs and a man thinks he owns you? It made no sense. He was the one cramming his most precious possession into a dark hole, he was the one you pinned with your knees around his waist and held until you chose to let him go. Sure, there was the chance you’d end up pregnant, but when you were a slut just like mama, you knew the way around that. Even at fifteen. Sex was a weapon, and it was a good route to getting what you wanted, be it a trip to the movies or just a rough voice whispering that he loved you, he loved you, oh, God, Faith, he’d love you forever, but it was nothing _special_.

Then she was Called, and she learned her body, learned the way it bent and bowed itself, learned the sharp, burning heat of excitement, the way that ramming a stake into an unprotected chest awoke a fire in her belly and slicked her thighs with sweat. She still wasn’t sure who’d started it, but the night she patrolled for the third time (six vampires in six hours, and she felt like she could’ve gone on forever) ended with her pressing her Watcher flat against the alley wall, one knee against the brick, hips grinding, fingers snarled like fishhooks through her hair. She hadn’t fucked a Watcher since that night.

Time to get back to basics.

The rooftop was gritty with gravel, and broken glass glittered in the corners like stars. Giles spread his coat out--forever the gentleman, she thought, for a heartbeat--and then he fell on her like a starving man falls on bread, hands knotting into her hair, mouth seeking hers. His lips tasted like blood and Guinness, and it was hard to focus past them, hard to keep her fumbling fingers obeying her commands and working the buckle of his belt. This was just another kind of patrol, a taking-of-stock, in its own strange way. Watcher and Slayer, together again, one on one. Even if he wasn’t her Watcher, even if she wasn’t his Slayer, even if they’d never been together before or would be again, they knew their roles, they knew the game.

Buffy’s room was right beneath them, just one layer of stone and insulation down. She wondered if Buffy would hear, if she’d care, if she’d snap out of her self-imposed isolation and come join them.

Might be good for everyone if she did.

Then the belt buckle gave, and his cock was burning in her hands while his mouth was eating her alive. She squeezed once--just enough to distract him and let her drop down to her knees, gravel biting through her jeans like tiny knives--and then she took him into her mouth, and Giles groaned, and the dance began anew.

They fucked until the sun began to tint the sky, until their backs were raw with scrapes and her thighs and belly and mouth were all sticky with sweat and semen. She curled against him, like she’d curled against that long-gone Watcher who first told her what she was (and Buffy never asked that first Watcher’s name), and closed her eyes.

Faith slept.

*

By noon the sun was overhead and far too hot to be denied. They sorted themselves from one another, limbs untangling with a finality that was almost sad, and they pulled their clothes back on, and they kissed each other goodbye. She could taste herself on his lips, all salt and acrid sweetness, and she smiled as she walked down the stairs, luxuriating in the feeling of denim grazing over the small wounds on her ass and thighs.

Buffy was standing outside her room, arms folded, leaning against the wall. She watched Faith’s descent impassively, and Faith felt her cheeks begin to redden. Still, she forced a little extra sway into her hips, stepping off the stairs and onto the walkway (clip-clip-clip, another day’s patrol begins), walking down that stained and dingy excuse for a Lover’s Lane.

“Hey, B,” she said, when she’d drawn close enough for casual conversation. “What’s shaking?”

“You were up late,” Buffy replied, flatly.

“Watched the sun come up,” Faith said. “Pretty. You should try it.” There was a second conversation between them, one that Faith could almost hear in the way they stood, the things they didn’t say. _Did you hear me fuck your Watcher last night, B? Did you lay down here picturing us? Which one of us did you want to be? Me, riding your daddy on the rooftop, or him, with his hands caught through my hair and his teeth against my throat?_

Buffy simply shrugged. “I haven’t been sleeping much.” _You know I did. You know I couldn’t miss it. Don’t make me look at you._

“You gonna hit the Dairy Queen today?”

“Thought I might check in on Dawn first.”

 _No, you won’t,_ thought Faith, and that was that; she flashed a smile as broken as the bottle that still glittered by the edge of the pool, and turned to walk back to her own room, clip-clip-clip, no longer finding anything gentle in the way her clothes pressed against the sores across her back.

It took thirty minutes in the shower to take the feeling of Buffy’s cold, accusing stare off her skin. And even then, she didn’t quite feel clean.

*

Giles, as she’d expected, was an old hand at this sort of thing; when Faith wandered down to the courtyard later, he just nodded at her like nothing had changed, like they didn’t both bear the same rooftop stigmata across their backs and shoulders. They’d both needed comfort: they’d both taken it. Now they were done, and it was just another day.

Some of the Potentials (the Slayers, dammit, the new _Slayers_ ) were playing four-square with a battered old yellow ball that they’d found rolling around the back of the bus after their escape from Sunnydale. Faith stood and watched them for a while, arms folded, admiring the way they lunged and parried to keep the ball in motion. They were coming into themselves, she knew; she remembered that period, when the Calling was still new and every breath was like a gift. Before she’d learned that nothing is really free, and that the gift came payment-on-delivery.

They’d learn, soon enough, when the feeling of sitting still became worse than pulled muscles or broken bones, when the need to patrol settled into the soles of their feet and made them weep for motion. To be a Slayer was to move, to dance, to fight until your heart was pounding and your breath was hot and heavy in your chest. To know the world in ways no one else would ever understand, except maybe for the monsters, because Slayers were closer to the monsters than they were to humans, in some ways.

Faith cataloged people by tastes. There was a fairy tale she read once where a prince had to find the princess he loved in a lineup of girls who looked just like her. But he’d fed her just one drop of honey, and so he walked from girl to girl, and kissed them all, and when he found the girl who tasted like honey he called her by name and took her home. She could understand that way of doing things. Angel--Buffy’s Angel, who'd kissed her once, when he was playing her like she was playing him--tasted like blood and coffee and self-loathing. Wood tasted like shaving cream and betrayal, and Giles, beneath the borrowed haze of Guinness, would taste like sharp black tea and quiet resignation. Those were the things that seeped into your pores after a while, and never quite came clean.

Buffy, she knew, would taste like Ivory soap and watermelon lip gloss; the sort that came in green tubes spattered with little pink spots that promised summer kisses even in the middle of December. That was just the surface, though; underneath, she’d taste like blood and sex and static, like laying your tongue against the surface of a battery. Even touching another Slayer bordered on electric, and kissing her would be enough to set the world on fire. Fucking her might bring reality’s whole house of cards crashing down to earth.

Maybe that’s why there was only supposed to be one.

The Potentials--the Slayers--would learn soon enough. This was just a stopping point, this weedy little motel with its empty swimming pool like a pulled tooth (like Sunnydale); soon the real adventure would begin. Finding the other Slayers, the ones scattered around the world, learning themselves without guidance, without support. The ones who had no Watchers to tell them "thou shalt not kill" or "destroy the darkness; that’s why you’re here, no reason more than that." That would be the real adventure.

Because in some of them, the electric current underneath the skin would be sharp and sour and broken. It would drive them out of their heads, looping back in on itself, and they would have to be put down. Faith killed a man, once, and they condemned her for it. Now they’d lead an army of children against a world filled with potentially broken Slayers, and Buffy would be exalted for it, because there was nothing else to do. They closed the door on one war. They opened it on another.

The ball hit the court and bounced wild, passing Rona even as she lunged. Faith moved too fast for their eyes to follow, hand hitting the ball and sending it rebounding back into the center of the court before the clip-clip of her heels had even faded from the air.

“Thanks, Faith!” someone called.

“No problem,” she replied, and turned, clip-clip-clip, to resume her slow, never-ending patrol.

Giles watched her go, and wished he had another beer.

*

Night fell and the adults--the adults, when the hell did _they_ become the adults, with their high school intrigues and their fresh little faces that betrayed their every thought like amateurs at a poker game--had gathered on the roof to plan what was going to happen next. Plans were good. Plans were reassuring. Plans were the security blankets of the Scooby gang, and for the first time ever, Faith realized she wanted a plan just as much as everybody else did. She wanted someone to tell her what to do. She wanted (Buffy) a Watcher to do what Watchers always did for Slayers: to put the stake into her hand, take her by the shoulders, and point her at the thing that needed killing.

So they needed a plan, and they talked. Giles pointed out that the remains of the Watchers’ Council would be mostly in Europe, where the greater majority of the surviving girls were, anyway. He’d already contacted his surviving colleagues in Africa and South America, he said, and they were starting the collection of the new Slayers, gathering them together in half a dozen safe locations for training. Wood said that he would stay in North America, hunting down the Slayers, one by one. Willow had search-and-find spells, Andrew had a decent body of training materials, Xander and Dawn and Kennedy--pretty Kennedy, who fucked her way into the position of second-string Scooby through the simple medium of having a pierced tongue and thighs she knew how to spread, and Faith would have hated her for that, if she didn’t understand the game--and Faith, well...Faith knew how the game was played.

Everyone had something to contribute. Everyone but Buffy, their golden girl, savior of the Slayer line, salvation of the world, who just stood there like she’d been carved out of marble and watched them with eyes that gave absolutely nothing away. Buffy, with her succession of dead boyfriends who died once when their hearts stopped beating and then a second time when she did what the Slayer was born to do and handed them over to destiny like the sacrificial lambs they really were.

 _Killed a lot more men than me, B,_ thought Faith, as she sharpened her knife against a tile from the courtyard below. _And took it a lot more personally._

That was the thing. It was always personal, with Buffy. You loved her or you hated her, but you couldn’t just ignore her, and she moved through the world like everything in it hurt her a hell of a lot more than it hurt anybody else. Like a storybook mermaid, walking on knives. Oh, other people were allowed to hurt, but their pain was never as big or as bad as Buffy’s, who stitched her hurts in glittering uppercase letters on the air all around her. Your wounds weren’t as deep or as dire as Buffy’s pain. Your need didn’t cut as cleanly as Buffy’s needs. No matter what you were or what you wanted, she was more, she wanted more, she _deserved_ more...and she made you believe it, just by walking into the room. Because it was always personal. Because that was how things had to be.

The talks continued. They decided to go to Europe. And Buffy turned and walked away. Faith stood, aware that her feet were anchored on the gravel where Giles had fucked her until she screamed and came once, twice, three times like firecrackers going off on Chinese New Year, and dropped her bit of tile, and followed.

*

A hastily-raised fist caught the motel door before it swung quite shut, preventing the latch from catching. Buffy gave it a dull shove, then simply glared, asking, “What do you want, Faith?”

“I want to talk. Remember talking? That thing that people do?” Faith pushed the door open with a casual sweep of her hand and sidled inside, leaving Buffy to watch her with angry impotence. She couldn’t take Faith in a fair fight, not anymore, and without a dying boyfriend to excuse her actions, she’d never take the gut-shot. Slayer on Slayer action was too closely balanced unless you were willing to get your hands a little dirty. “I say hey, you say hey, I say what’s up, you say something more concrete than ‘I think I’ll check on Dawn.' You know she’s been doing the ugly with Xander for the last three days, don’t you? He turned me down when I offered. Said Anya wouldn’t forgive him. But apparently she’ll forgive him for taking a ride in the glowing green keyhole.”

Buffy shut the door, expression sliding towards neutral. “Why are you trying to make me angry?”

“Fuck, B, I’m telling the truth! A little vulgar, maybe, but you haven’t even bothered to check, have you?” Faith sat down on the edge of the bed, noting the heap of blankets on the floor and the pile of dirty towels in the bathroom. “Don’t like housekeeping? They leave chocolates on your pillow. Or they would, if this motel didn’t suck.”

“Get out.”

“No kiss goodnight?” Faith remained seated on the bed, leaning back on her hands and noting the way the rough mattress pressed against her palms. No expensive bedding for this place, oh, no; this was bottom of the line necessity, box springs that creaked and beds that needed sheets if you didn’t want the morning to find you rubbed raw.

“Dammit, Faith. I am...trying...to hold this together.”

“No. You’re ‘trying’ to pretend you died with Sunnydale. Why’d you bother running to catch the bus if you didn’t care about getting out alive?”

“The scythe...”

“Is just a sharp thing. We’re Slayers. We have lots of sharp things.” Like words and nails and baby blue eyes that looked at her like everything was personal. _Watermelon,_ Faith thought, and continued, “We got along without it for centuries. Losing it stopping the biggest evil ever wouldn’t suck.”

Buffy looked at her, eyes wide and wounded. “Why are you here?”

“Because you need me.” In one motion Faith was on her feet, hand on the door behind Buffy’s head, firmly in the other Slayer’s personal space. “Because I have always been your wicked stepsister and your fucked-up mirror image and all that other shit I know you tell yourself when you turn off the lights and try to justify your life. The people you’ve killed, the way it feels when you Slay, the way it’s never enough--it’s always so damn personal with you, B, and it ain’t never enough. Isn’t that so? You need me. You need me so you can make excuses.”

“Get off me, Faith,” Buffy said, coldly.

“Make me,” Faith replied, and before she quite understood what she was going to do, she was kissing her, fuck-me-red lips on paler natural pink, her tongue darting out to brush against the smaller Slayer’s teeth, tasting her. _I was wrong,_ she thought, through her amazement. _Not watermelon--cherries._

Buffy’s backhand rocked her backward, and Faith smiled.

“Paying attention yet?” she asked.

“How...how dare you...”

“Pretty easy,” Faith said, licking the blood from the corner of her mouth; it was a casual, almost automatic gesture, like brushing the hair out of her eyes or wiping away the sweat when it gathered on her skin. “I just leaned forward and there you were.”

“Faith, you don’t understand. You don’t understand how _hard_ this is.”

“Here we go again,” Faith groaned, flopping backwards onto the bed. “I don’t understand ‘cause you won’t _let_ me understand, Buffy. You won’t let _anyone_ understand. You get that, right? This is not the Buffy-and-friends show; this is real life. But you still go swanning the fuck around like you know it all and we’re just extras, in again out again, you’ll cast another lot next week. If you told us, maybe we could help. If you told us--”

“I left Spike down there to _die_!” Buffy shouted, and it was like the motel held its breath around them.

 _Thin walls..._ Faith thought, and then she was on her feet again, moving towards Buffy, hands down by her sides where they’d look less threatening. “And? Xander left Anya to die. Andrew’s still trying to pretend he doesn’t want to be dead because of that. They’re both trying to pretend it wouldn’t have been different if you’d sent Xander with Anya instead of using him to protect Dawn. Ain’t working, but they’re trying. Every shiny new Slayer in this building left somebody down in that pit, and they’re still moving on. But you ball up in your little ‘nest of pain’ and tell us we don’t understand, when you’ve never even bothered to ask us what we lost. Fuck you, B. Don’t you _get_ it? You’re the leader. You made yourself the leader. You made the calls, you chose the battle, you carry the shiny stick--so you gotta lead. Right now, we’re just holding our ground, because _you_ won’t let us _understand_.”

“It’s too _hard_!”

“And you don’t have a _choice_!”

They stared at each other for a while, the first two Slayers--and did it really matter which of them was Called first, now, when they had a whole world full of infant Slayers to find and guide, when they had to work together, because only they understood what it was to think you’d have to face the world alone, one girl in a generation, no backup, no help? Did it matter anymore? They were both here, at the motel at the end of the world.

“Faith, please...” Buffy whispered.

And then she was kissing her again, and this time Buffy was holding her, fingers clutching at her back and shoulders like she was afraid that Faith was going to vanish like all the rest, the vampire boyfriends and the mothers and the father-figures and the little sisters who might or might not be real. There was time to sample and to catalog her tastes now--cherry lip gloss, not watermelon, and cheap motel soap, not the Ivory she’d always imagined; like all the rest of them, Buffy had fallen in the world, becoming a tainted angel, not so high above, not so untouchable.

Then Buffy was pulling away, and those eyes, still so wide, still so wounded, looking up at her--she was so _small_ \--and then she was asking, “Faith?”

“Yeah, B?”

“If I watch the sun come up with you, will you leave me alone on the roof, too?”

It was such an unexpected question that Faith laughed, the sound as hard and sharp as the broken tiles in the courtyard, before scooping Buffy off the ground and walking over to the uncovered mattress. She sat again, Buffy in her lap, and laced her fingers (like fishhooks) through that golden hair, and whispered, “I can survive a sunrise or two.”

After that, there was no need for words.

Slayers didn’t scar as badly as most people. Faith had been thrilled when she learned that, because even a girl who failed high school biology could tell what that said about the body’s recovery rates. A body that could shrug off mortal wounds with nothing but a pale road map of hardened tissue left behind could handle alcohol poisoning, sleep deprivation, a few recreational pharmaceuticals--no problem. And sure, that meant aspirin was a joke and Midol was pointless, but there was always morphine from the inevitable dealer down the street, and most pain could just be shrugged away if you tried hard enough. Slayers didn’t scar. And that meant that Buffy’s body was a testimony to how damn hard a Slayer was to kill, because Faith could follow the battles across her skin like highways to eternity.

Here, on the right breast; three shallow, parallel scars that were invisible until your mouth was on her nipple; on the stomach, the barely-healed valley of a gut wound. Patterns on the neck from vampire teeth, jags on the delicate skin of ankles, elbows, wrists. Faith sought them out, one by one, traced them with her tongue, noted the way the taste of them varied from the skin on either side--just a little sharper, the sour-sweet taste of healing that never went away. Give a Slayer long enough and her whole body would taste that way, bitter and addictive. Faith wondered whether Angel tasted that, too, whether Spike did; whether they would agree when she said cherry-soap-misery-joy to them, all rapid-fire, like an order from the menu.

Buffy groaned, pulling her closer, and Faith flipped over to put herself on the bottom and Buffy on the top, letting gravity do the hard part of the job while her hands transcribed the arch of Buffy’s waist, the muscles of her thighs. She’d never fucked another Slayer before, and it was just like she’d hoped and feared, and a thousand times better and a thousand times worse at the same time; like shoving her tongue straight into an electric socket. One that tasted like cherries and screamed her name so loudly that the whole damn motel had to know, even Dawn, safe and secure in the arms of a carpenter who dreamed of demons.

Faith didn’t let it get to her head; Buffy screamed for Spike, and Angel, and Riley too, before they finished. The mattress was harder on her back than the gravel had been, and she resolved that next time, she’d fuck being polite and take Buffy to the roof, where they could see the stars.

When they were done they curled together in a slowly cooling pile of limbs and sweat and sex and tangled hair; Buffy’s head rested on her shoulder, her body curled up like a comma, punctuating what was still to come.

“Faith?” she said.

“Yeah, Buffy?”

“You taste like lilacs.”

Faith closed her eyes, and smiled.


End file.
